This image provided by the National Gallery in London via the Minneapolis Institute of Arts shows Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks,” on loan from the National Gallery in London. The painting, revealed Friday, May 15, 2015, is the second of three surprises the museum is presenting for its 100th birthday celebration. (National Gallery in London via the Minneapolis Institute of Arts via AP)

“May is Mary’s month…” – so we are reminded by the first line of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ “The May Magnificat.”

Mother’s Day comes with the start of May – a day for celebrating our mothers but also, in Hopkins’ further words, “Spring’s universal bliss… This ecstasy all through mothering earth.”

This May I’ve just read “Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico” (Ashgate, 2012), written by a good friend, Joseph Kroger, and his Mexican colleague Patrizia Granziera.

The book describes the many ways that Christian devotion, especially in Mexico, has seen Mary’s motherhood as the most important symbol for the Creation – for God’s ongoing birthing and nurturing of our world.

Yet the book tells us about older devotion to goddesses who governed the cycles of life’s fertility. Its focus is on Aztec devotions that preceded Christianity in Mexico, yet it builds on scholarship that has made us aware of the universality of goddess/fertility devotion in ancient and native cultures. Made us aware, in other words, of how we humans have long understood the world’s and our own fertility as flowing from a divine maternity understood as some form of belief in the Great Mother.

The book’s particular theme concerns the way that Christian devotion to Mary replaced the goddesses when Spain conquered Mexico. Yet it also shows how Marian iconography throughout Mexico still contains and continues that antecedent goddess devotion. It is a good read – very scholarly and comprehensive, yet very clearly written and illustrated with excellent photographs and reproductions. I recommend it highly.

Yet I want to move thought in a less scholarly direction – hoping by my reflection to invite the reader into her or his reflection, and so perhaps into shared celebration.

These days we rightly acknowledge that women’s own voices most help us understand the reality and mystery of motherhood. Yet we men also live from and with our mothers, and with the motherhood of our wives, daughters and friends.

A man’s reflections risk becoming sentimental, so it’s best to start and stick with facts. Yet the simple facts are stunning enough. Hopkins’ words may be exuberant, but they do not exaggerate. There really is “Spring’s universal bliss … . This ecstasy all through mothering earth.”

We feel it in the air we breathe, the warmth of sun on skin, the return of nature’s full palette, and children playing outside again on sidewalk and in schoolyard. And for most also, perhaps especially, in the presence or memory of our own mother. Memory of constant care, but also of so much hard work and of the great maternal intelligence that has sustained not just family, but community and church and the larger human family across the globe.

Thus it should be no surprise (though our Western religions have led us to forget) that humans have always felt and often expressed their sense of a divine maternity, of that Great Mother who holds not just the little bitty baby, but the whole world in Her hands.

It’s also a hard fact that far too many mothers, today and throughout human history, have been left alone in such work, often abused, typically underpaid, very frequently poor, often homeless or immigrants or refugees.

Activists who support the Affordable Care Act’s employer contraceptive mandate have their hopes deflated outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, District of Columbia, U.S., on Monday, June 30, 2014 after the Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that for-profit employers with religious objections can opt out of providing contraception coverage under Obamacare. (Photographer: Pete Marovich/Bloomberg)

As usual, Jesuit priest Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, brings context and clarity to the debate over the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act.

“Hobby Lobby got what it wanted. The owners will no longer have to pay for coverage of the two contraceptives (IUDs and Plan B) that they consider abortifacients…. but the decision’s discussion of the accommodation granted to religious corporations will make it very difficult for the (Catholic) bishops to win their case against it,” he wrote in his column.

Churches and religious groups, including Catholic parishes and dioceses, were already exempt from the mandate that employers pay for their employees’ contraception coverage.

Religious corporations were given “an accommodations” so the nonprofit organizations would not have to pay for contraceptives in their insurance plans — but their insurance companies would provide birth control coverage to the employees at no cost to employers because it would be cheaper than paying for live births. The employer simply would have to fill out EBSA Form 700 and send it to the insurance company.

“In the Hobby Lobby decision, the court argued that the accommodation should also be offered to for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby. The accommodation was seen by the court as an excellent way of respecting the religious views of the company while still getting contraceptives to its employees,” Reese wrote. “In his oral presentation to the court, the Hobby Lobby lawyer said such an accommodation would be acceptable to his client.”

Yet, some religious employers, including Catholic bishops, are suing over the accommodation because, they argue, filling out the form for insurance companies would be “immoral cooperation in the evil.”

I celebrate recent victories in the legal and cultural struggle for recognition of homosexual marriage.

Yet I want to suggest, as strongly as I can, that this struggle is not the most important concern over marriage facing our nation. The far more important issue – the real issue, though it gets far less attention in the media – concerns how we, despite present religious and cultural divides, can nonetheless work to support and strengthen traditional or heterosexual marriage.

I have often written that the Catholic Church should, in faithfulness to the natural-law roots of its moral tradition, be among the first to affirm and support in its law and ritual the sexual covenants of our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers. For it is increasingly clear, even if not yet fully understood, that same-sex attraction is natural, i.e., it is a condition given with their humanity, not a matter of choice or deviance.

Thus there should be no reason (other than its failure to adequately develop its moral teachings and the preoccupation of some churchmen with short-term political goals) why the Catholic Church, along with other Christian churches, should not presently support the struggle for civic recognition of homosexual marriage.

I also, however, think that in its own rituals for marriage, Catholicism should maintain a distinction between heterosexual and homosexual marriage. Why? Because Catholicism’s long tradition of understanding marriage as having two interwoven purposes – the loving fidelity of the couple and the procreation of children – remains today very, very important. Thus the development of Catholic moral teaching and sacramental ritual needs to provide a new and sacramental blessing for the covenants of homosexuals since, by nature, their sexual unions can and should be faithful and loving, but cannot be procreative.

I realize that many, left and right, will scoff at my thinking – dismissing it from their conflicting perspectives as based on distinctions where there is no real difference. Yet this brings back to “the real issue” and consequent challenge for both churches and our larger society: the need for defense of and support for heterosexual marriage which, by nature, is procreative.

Once upon a time, so memory suggests, politics often meant negotiation and compromise.

Once upon a time, the Catholic Church (that supposed bastion of inflexibility) was quite expert in the pastoral arts of diplomacy and responding to practical circumstances. Once upon a time, mature human beings understood the difference between deep convictions and practical prudence – the fact that generally we must struggle for our ideals by taking account of current conditions.

It often seems those days are long gone. The virtue of prudence and the arts of negotiation and compromise are not only too little practiced, but too often imagined as cowardly or corrupt. Real men, it seems, don’t compromise. Nor do our new iron ladies.

I had hoped, for instance, civil unions would be a good compromise between gay rights and family values. Yet recent controversy in Colorado, where civil unions legislation is finally about to pass (complementing and correcting a prior “defense of (traditional) marriage” amendment to the state Constitution), suggests little mood for compromise.

The religious and political right sees a slippery slope further undermining family values, and (correctly, one suspects) fears that the political and cultural left will force church charities out of adoption services by mandating inclusion gay and lesbian couples. At street level, a “Christian” baker refuses to make a “wedding cake” for a gay couple and is vilified by liberal media.

Can’t we find ways to compromise without abandoning principle? Why not bake a cake and let the consumer add their own figurines? Why not just support another bakery? Why not admit that religious adoption agencies have long done and should continue an important public service, while also ensuring there are other agencies that include gay and lesbian families? Why not admit that the real threats to traditional family values have nothing to do with gay and lesbian desire for inclusion in those values – that, on the contrary, such desire could provide common ground for struggle against those real threats.

Why not? Because we’re too often less interested in practical progress than in winning. It’s better for “us” when “they” are the enemy — when we are (absolutely) right and they (absolutely) wrong.

As Mitt Romney’s would-be presidential bus careened up and down America’s roads and cable channels this past year, U.S. Catholic bishops took over the tail gunner seats. The bishops directed much of their fire at President Obama — not just his candidacy, but his morality.

The bishops claimed that Obama was so closely associated with intrinsic evil that a vote for him was itself intrinsically evil. You could be a Democrat and vote for Obama, or you could be a faithful Catholic. You could not be both.

The U.S. Bishops Portrayal of Obama as Evil

The bishops’ attacks on Obama were personal, orchestrated, heavily-funded, ubiquitous and frequently hateful. The basic message — Obama is evil — was scripted centrally with the bishops’ political advisers and political partners. The message was then delivered from pastors’ pulpits, parish bulletins and church-usher handouts, diocesan newspaper columns and full-page secular Sunday newspaper political ads, from YouTube videos, Fox News interviews, complaints filed in federal courts, C-Span televised congressional committee appearances, and a national novena spectacle — the “Fortnight for Freedom Campaign.”

The bishops’ Fortnight featured the medieval Roman Catholic heroism of Thomas More, Henry VIII’s lord chancellor. Never mind that More spent a significant part of his English political career torturing and putting people to death, particularly Lutherans, who had sought to reform various Roman Catholic practices and preaching, such as the sale of indulgences. Set them afire after tying them to stakes. To More, the “reformers” were heretics. If you were More (or Augustine or Aquinas), that’s what you did with heretics. You put them to death. Nonetheless, U.S. bishops presented More as their modern model of Heroic Religious Freedom.

Accusations of Obama’s evilness came from a broad range of the U.S. episcopacy. Several Catholic bishops repeatedly portrayed Obama’s political beliefs as Stalin-like, Hitler-like, satanically connected, “intrinsically evil” and anti-Catholic. Obama was a man whose political purposes would inevitably bring about the physical martyrdom of our bravest bishops.

Some independent Catholic journals and writers objected to the bishops’ tactics. There was no report of any bishop objecting.

There have been no apologies. Instead, bishops are now telling Catholics who voted for Obama that they have been morally complicit in the re-election of this evil president. Catholics who voted for Obama have been promised remedial evangelization.

In the United States, bishops have every legal right to politically evangelize in the public square as well as in the cathedral plaza. But not everything legal is moral. There is deep immorality in using evangelization tactics that are dominated by political character assassination, by political lies. What can be worse than being defined as “intrinsically evil,” depraved to your very core.

Some journalists predict that the bishops’ Stalin, Hitler, “intrinsic evil” poisons will remain in the bloodstream of the body politic long after the election.

Indeed, President Obama’s post-Aurora, post-Newtown, post-election call for regulatory and legislative gun control changes are being fought with rhetoric that mimics the bishops’ tactics. Obama’s efforts to reduce gun violence are Hitler-like and Stalin-like. Obama is like Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez. Obama wants to take away gun owners’ sacred Second Amendment rights, just as he wants to take away Catholic employers’ sacred First Amendment right to deny their women employees’ contraceptive health insurance choices.

While the bishops could not give Romney an electoral victory, their tactics did deliver to him a significant majority of the votes of white Catholics, particularly older white men. The growing alliance between the bishops’ dominant Catholic voting bloc and white evangelical Southern voters is not a relationship that bodes well for racial or ethnic minorities, or for women.

Those who will oppose Obama’s income tax reforms, health care reforms, immigration reform, war and peace policies, gun violence reform, economic and social justice policies, same sex marriage reforms — those people will benefit greatly from the bishops’ characterization of Obama as evil. Having lost the election to him, many of Obama’s political opponents will do whatever it takes to defeat his presidency— the same policy that the Republican party leadership boasted about in 2008. Those politics are both fathered and fed by the bishops’ ancient tactic — what good can come out of someone so evil?

So, there is miserable irony here. The key moral story of the 2012 elections is the Catholic bishops’ collective, shameful and toxic immorality.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, speaks at the conference's annual fall meeting in Baltimore, Monday, Nov. 12, 2012.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is holding its annual conference this week in Baltimore, and many in the pews are wondering if there’s any soul searching about the thumping their political positions took at the polls last week.

President Barack Obama was re-elected, despite the bishops’ wading deep into partisan politics to “guide” Catholics and other Christian voters away from him — even launching their own “Fortnight of Freedom” political campaign in opposition to his Obamacare. Not only will Obama’s Health and Human Services mandate that employers offer coverage of contraception move forward, but he will appoint any new Supreme Court justices for the next four years. Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land for the foreseeable future. And, on top of this, every state vote on same-sex marriage went to the gay activists.

An open letter to Archbishop Samuel Aquila from Richard Detsch of Lafayette:

Your letter (ad) in Sunday’s Denver Post, ostensibly in support of religious freedom, is disingenuous in at least two respects:

First, your purpose in writing this letter is to enforce your ban on contraception, not to defend religious freedom. In fact, nobody’s religious freedom is being violated by the Health and Human Services mandate to make contraceptive means accessible. Catholics are free to refuse this access, just as Catholics for whom your contraception ban violates their consciences are free to avail themselves of this access.

Catholic businesses and institutions that employ non-Catholics do not, of course, have the right to force their religious beliefs on their non-Catholic employees, which would be a violation of the very religious freedom your letter professes to uphold.

Second, in pleading your case for religious freedom, you neglect to refer to the fact that our own church in the not-too-distant past has magisterially taken the exact opposite position. In 1864, Pope Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, specifically condemned the concept of religious freedom in Propositions 15 and 78. Six years later, this same pope, who had been the sovereign ruler of the Papal States, had himself proclaimed infallible in matters of faith and morals by the first Vatican Council, thus lending additional weight to his Syllabus of Errors. Catholic countries, such as the Papal States and Spain, had no religious freedom.

There is a more serious consideration in this matter. It is known that people in this country are dying because of lack of access to health care, a situation the Affordable Care Act is intended to remedy. In your not-so-subtle encouragement to vote for the man and party pledged to overturn the Affordable Care Act, you would bear some responsibility for the deaths of these people.

Does your goal of upholding the church ban on contraception really justify these deaths?

Rev. Michael Pfleger delivers his sermon at St. Sabina Catholic Church during the predominantly African-American congregation's Unity Mass in Chicago on Sept. 2, 2012. A Reuters/Ipsos Poll conducted last weekend reveals the divergent opinions in the Church and shows that Catholics are divided equally between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

I recently read the interesting claim that there no longer is a monolithic “Catholic vote,” but that Catholic voting matters nonetheless because Catholics are a large group that mirrors major trends in the electorate at large.

I think the first part is quite true. There no longer is a unified (one-time Democratic Party line) Catholic vote. As I think about it, that pro-Democratic vote among traditional, even non-Hispanic Catholics, ended for two reasons. First, the Democratic Party is influenced by one dominant form of feminism and went dogmatically and ideologically “pro-choice.” The Republicans then gradually tried to gain among conservative Christians by becoming at least rhetorically anti-abortion.

The Joe Biden-Paul Ryan vice presidential debate Thursday is the first time this event has pitted two Catholics against each other. The national group, Catholic Democrats, is calling attention to the debate and urging Catholics to host house parties for viewing and discussion.

Their “Action Alert,” emailed Oct. 5, provides context for the debate by noting two seemingly coincidental anniversaries of great importance for Catholics: Oct. 11 is the 50th anniversary of the convening of Vatican II under Pope John XXIII, as well as the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II.

These anniversaries, they say, “provide a special context for the stark contrast” between Vice President Biden and U.S. Rep. Ryan in terms of their views on public policy and the rich tradition of Catholic social justice.

Further emphasizing this sense of contrast, the Action Alert’s masthead presented their photos and accompanying photos of their inspirational figures, Mother Theresa and novelist Ayn Rand.

The vice presidential debate won’t be Mother Theresa vs. Ayn Rand, yet these icons of two social philosophies are good figureheads for it.

Of course, neither the Gospels nor the long tradition of Catholic social justice teachings — contained in the Documents of Vatican Council II as well as in the Catechism of the Catholic Church – provide Catholics and other Christians with a specific blueprint or key for interpreting the political and economic debate between Ryan and Biden. Catholic social teachings actually emphasize both individual responsibility and the importance of family, community and solidarity with the wider world.

Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.